Tips and tutorials for GIS and Remote Sensing…

Tag Archives: VirtualBox

Although some efforts have been made to create windows versions of the software in the stack we use, the main platform we’re using and developing on is Linux (or OS X). Therefore, the advice we normally give people wanting to use RSGISLib or SPDLib on Windows is to install Linux in a virtual machine and use this.

Below are the steps needed to get everything working on a virtual machine. All these steps assume a 64-bit version of Windows (as you’ll need to install a 64-bit version of Linux). There is lots on information on the internet which provides more detail on the specifics of setting up a virtual machine and installing Linux, so I’ve just provided an overview of these.

There are a number of Linux distributions available. The recommenced distribution is Ubuntu, which is available to download from http://www.ubuntu.com/download. If you’re computer has limited RAM (less than 4 GB), you might want to consider a more lightweight version such as lubunbu

Whichever distribution you chose make sure you download a 64-bit desktop CD / DVD image. Note: you don’t actually have to burn the image to a CD, the iso file is fine.

Set up a new virtual machine

The VirtualBox documentation has a good step-by-step guide to setting up a virtual machine (http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html) and there is lots of documentation available on the internet. Important considerations are to allocate enough space for the virtual machine hard drive, if you select a dynamically allocated hard drive it won’t use the full capacity at once but will be able to grow as you need it. Also give the virtual machine as much RAM as you can spare.

Install Linux

When you first start the virtual machine you will be prompted to install an operating system, select the Linux .iso file you have downloaded and it should boot off this.

The installation procedure will depend on the Linux distribution you have. Instructions for Ubuntu are here. At some point in the installation it might warn you about erasing all data on the disk, don’t worry about this it’s only the virtual disk you have just created.

Install guest additions

Once Linux has been installed you need to install the ‘Guest additions’, to do this select Devices, ‘Install Guest Additions CD Image’ from the VirtualBox menu, then follow the prompts within Linux.

Setup for copying data

The easiest way to copy data to and from the machine is to enable drag and drop. Once the machine is turned on go to Devices, Drag and Drop, and select ‘Bidirectional’. This will allow you to drag and drop files to the virtual machine. You can also set up a shared folder, there are some details on this here.

Install the software stack

As detailed in earlier posts, we make Linux binaries of the software we develop available through conda. To get everything installed, follow the steps below within the virtual machine:

Install conda

Download the latest version from here, grab the 64-bit Python 3.5 installer. Once the file has downloaded open a terminal window (in ubuntu, click on the icon in the top left and start typing ‘Terminal’, click on the application which pops up).